Category Archives: Events
PlateCooks 2011
Here are some impressions from PlateCooks 2011. It was a three action-packed days of cooking, networking and tasting with some of the most innovative chefs in America. PolyScience was there to support the event and some hands on sous vide workshops with Chef Dominique Crenn from Atelier Crenn in San Francisco and Chef Pat Sheerin from Signature Room in Chicago.
Photo courtesy of MTG (www.meatingplace.com)
Bill Kim (right) from Urban Belly and Belly Shack
line up of the usual suspects
122.0 F
Joe Strybel, PolyScience
Pat Sheerin, Signature Room - Chicago (right)
Our friend Stephen from "Australian Lamb"
Joe Strybel, PolyScience
Dominique Crenn from Atelier Crenn - San Francisco
HOST in Italy
A big thank you to the whole team at ULISSE FOODSERVICE in Italy for putting together this incredible presentation of PolyScience products at the show HOST! Contact ULISSE for PolyScience products in Italy.
The great Francesco Gotti presenting sous vide cooking!
- Danilo from Ulisse, PolyScience distributor in Italy
Getting ready for the crowd...
Warm foams and soups at the iSi booth.
Ideas from the PolyScience booth at StarChefs
Of course we like to have some fun during an event like this! Shows like StarChefs are the perfect moment to play with our own culinary technology, try out things that we haven’t done yet or come up with new ideas. Most time it happens when curious chefs walk up to us and say ask: “What happens if…?” We then mostly say: “Let’s try it out right now and see!”
So here is a quick write up of the many crazy or interesting ideas that stuck with us. Some are just silly, but we were curious to see what would happen. Others are very relevant and some may actually be realized with some refining.
Rapid Ageing: The Sonicprep makes it possible to substitute traditional wood-barrel aging by infusing liquids with barrel wood chips. So far good results have been produced with sauces (fish sauce, soy sauce, and Worcestershire sauce) or Calvados, cider or wines. Pretty out there is the idea of barrel aging the Modernist Cuisine Rare Beef Jus using the SonicPrep.
Infusion of fresh herbs into finished soup: Instead of cooking herbs with the soup, simply use ultrasonic sound waves to infuse the aroma before serving to impart cleaner and brighter uncooked flavors.
Liquor Infusion: We showed how to infuse vodka with citrus peels in 90 seconds. The potential to infuse on-demand or larger batches as mise en place very quickly seems to be quite appealing to many mixologists and chefs. To produce a great mint flavor in a mojito, we infused fresh mint into rum before continuing with the traditional method. The Sonicprep would not work for mixing the lime into the cocktail. Using Fresh Origins edible micro flowers for infusion didn’t result in a pleasant flavor.
Hybrid Creams: As part of their pre-StarChef’s ICC workshop research, Alex and Aki created a watermelon/bacon fat creme that they used to cook halibut sous vide in. Alvin Schultz brought up the idea of playing with new versions of “gravy” by homogenizing chicken jus and rendered chicken or making the Modernist Cuisine liquid Caprese (tomato water, and mozzarella cream).
Hydrocolloid Emulsions: This is still an open question: What happens when blending Olive Oil and Gelatin solution to potentially yield a simple olive oil gummy?
Ultrasonic French Fries: Another open experiment: Sonicate cut potato in water, then fry. How would these compare to the Modernist Cuisine fries and cryo-blanched fries.
Degassing beverages: We know already that wine benefits from degassing with the Sonicprep. This time we tried beer. The result wasn’t anything that makes us want to repeat it. But tap water actually was surprisingly more smooth. Throwing in a couple wood chips made it even sweeter. At the end it may have been able to compete with some bottled water brands. One could also call it “cold prepared wood tea”.
Separating apple cider into clear cider and apple butter: We used fresh cider, so no alcohol in there, otherwise the clear apple cider would be your typical Calvados. However, the remaining solids turned out as an incredibly intense “apple butter”. Since we vacuum boiled it and the apples were not exposed to high heat, all the wonderful aromas still were there. The aroma comparison of the clear cider vs the solids was also very interesting. The clear cider had a green, fresh apple aroma. The “apple butter” was more like a sweet roll, almost cinnamon-infused aroma. (According to the ingredients list of the cider jug, no spices were added)
low temp separation of clear apple cider (left) and a powerful "apple butter" (right)
Beer Whiskey: Putting a bottle of Hennepin Beer through the rotovap process was interesting. The feedback was between “terrible” and “interesting”. We also wondered what would happen if we re-carbonated it in an iSi siphon and chilled it in a Refrigerated Circulating Bath for a very hoppy, high proof beer…
Infusing vodka with orange citrus peel and lavender
Separating Habanero aroma from Capsaicin: This has been done successfully many times, but most people still haven’t had the chance yet to taste it. It’s pretty amazing to taste how aromatic Habanero is once you remove the active component that is responsible for the heat.
“Super Chiller” or Refrigerated Circulating Bath Bath
Aging fish at 0C: Something we’ll be looking into is the idea of using the Refrigerated Circulating Bath to hold fish at precisely 0°C to allow for ageing as described in Sunday’s main stage demo by Bjorn Frantzen and Daniel Lindenberg.
The Aviary Old Fashioned in the Rocks: Still one of the most creative applications for a Refrigerated Circulating Bath has been developed by the Aviary team. As this video shows, the goal is to produce an ice shell that holds a cocktail and is then cracked open by the drinker. To freeze the shell, fill a balloon with water and freeze the shell in a alcohol/water mix at -10C, drill a hole to drain the remaining liquid and replace the void with a cocktail.
Programmable Cook-Chill with remote iPhone control: We demonstrated how the new PolyScience Programmable Refrigerated Circulating Bath can be programmed for automated cook-chill processes with remote control and monitoring via our iPhone application. Temperature data is logged into Excel by simply putting a USB flash drive into the back of the unit. For a set up to acommodate larger batches of cook-chill, we recommend the Sous Vide Table by Randell.
Circulating duck fat: a number of people asked if it is possible to circulate duck fat and how they would clean the unit afterwards. Yes, the Sous Vide Professional is capable of circulating butter, duck fat or other liquids. However, if your application doesn’t require a whole tank full of duck fat, you can also simply use small hotel pans filled with the desired liquid and set it into the precisely controlled circulated bath (This can also provide the benefits of Sous Vide cooking without involving a vacuum sealer and local health department requirements that go with that). To clean the unit, simply run it in a vinegar, water, and non-foaming dish detergent mix.
Producing and holding warm cocktail foams, Olive Oil Chantilly and egg-yolk based sauces:
The new Whip Canister Holder - 1 fits all size canisters! No floating canisters. No abuse to the lever.
Infusions of botanicals into alcohol or syrups in sous vide bath: Something we hear from more and more chefs/pastry chefs is that they use the Sous Vide Professional for
Infusion of flavors and aromas into custard. This isn’t anything new in terms of flavor, but it is a time saver. We poured a traditional Crème Anglaise mix into the vacuum bag, added a couple twigs of lavender, sealed it, and cooked it for 20 min at 179F. Afterwards we massaged the bag to distribute the lavender… the crème had just the right hint of lavender.
Flavored snow: this is something that sounds good in theory, but may not work. Philip came up with the idea putting a larger cover on the Anti-Griddle (Cambro tank size) and humidifying it with a flavored liquid (perhaps rotovap’ed orange) to create a flavored “snow”. It wouldn’t take long to produce some snow. So, we’ll try it out soon.
Holding frozen delicate foods during service: One chef mentioned the he uses the Anti-Griddle at the garde manger station during busy times to prepare and hold finely grated frozen smoked salmon. Interesting…
Saffron Smoked Chocolate Mousse: This is a cool idea we came up with in discussions during the show but did not try yet. Fill iSi whipper with a chocolate mousse base, set up The Smoking Gun with 2 pinches of dried saffron, and inject saffron smoke into the canister. Then charge the canister with gas and foam the chocolate mousse infused with smoke aroma.
Catching up in the booth: Jeffrey Steingarten, Philip Preston, Nastassia Lopez, Dave Arnold, Johnny Iuzzini, Alvin Schultz and Joe Strybel
A special thank you goes out to Arielle Johnson and Alvin Schultz, our volunteer helpers we had this year in our booth!
“Sous Vide Your Way” by Ideas in Food
Back in the office from a successful and exciting 2011 StarChefs ICC, we thought it might be a good idea to recap what we considered as the highlights and what we were able to capture from this busy event. We start out with the workshop “Sous Vide Your Way” by Alex and Aki from Ideas in Food.
They really set out to push the limits by presenting not only new ideas on sous vide but also allowing the sold-out workshop to taste each dish, which included 5 variations of a group of ingredients:
- Venison Flank Steak Salad, Pickled Butternut Squash, Smoked Squid, Barrel Aged Venison Jus
- Venison Shank, Butternut Butter Cream, Lemon Scented Squid, Saltwort
- Venison Heart “Bolognese”, Coco-Cayenne Rigatoni, Coconut Milk
- Pecan Crusted Venison Heart, Coconut Cream Lentils, Diced Roasted Squash
- Coconut Milk Brined Venison Rack, Butternut Braised Cabbage
Alex and Aki were so kind to allow us to post in the following their own summary and recap of the workshop as a guest post right here, including their amazing recipes (link to recipe PDF)
By Aki Kamozawa & H. Alexander Talbot – Photos courtesy of John Sconzo
Alexander Talbot
We were very excited when Star Chefs reached out to us and asked us to do a sous vide workshop for their International Chefs Congress this past year. Hearing that PolyScience was a sponsor for the event made things even better because it was an opportunity to play with some pretty cool new equipment.
Aki Kamozawa
After playing around with a used immersion circulator that we bought off of eBay back in the day, their immersion circulator was our first major investment into the world of sous vide. We still have that original circulator, along with a few others and it is still going strong in our kitchen. The Smoking Gun was another worthwhile purchase, allowing us to use small amounts of smoke to add flavor to ingredients and dishes in our kitchen instead of firing up the big smoker in the backyard.
Having attended the congress for the previous four years we were fired up to do something that would be both interactive and thought provoking.
5 courses in 50 minutes
In our minds sous vide cooking is a creative platform. It is a relatively low maintenance technique that frees a chef’s hands and mind to refine and create. Of course it’s not easy to present sous vide in a 50-minute hands-on workshop. Since it’s primarily a slow cooking process and we wanted to showcase a variety of different preparations, we asked ourselves how chefs learn best.
The first answer was by doing. The second answer was by tasting. Since it wasn’t feasible to have everyone do the cooking in the time allowed we decided to have them taste everything instead and experience the results of our sous vide techniques.
We gave out recipes at the end so that participants would know how we cooked everything and could take the techniques back to their own kitchens and tinker away, changing and extrapolating until they found their own perfect balance. Most chefs have enough accumulated knowledge and understanding of the cooking process to tailor sous vide to their taste, it’s just a question of having enough technical information to provide a solid jumping off point.
Of course we had a few things to say about our own experiences with sous vide. The most important being our belief that it is primarily a preparation technique and not a finishing technique. Yes you can use a circulator to re-therm something and bring it back to temperature before serving it but the real value lies in its ability to par-cook something, adding texture and flavor, giving the cook something ready to be finished “a la minute” before serving it to the diner.
When it comes to cooking meats, temperatures never fall below 50°C. This is because at 49°C the proteins in the meat really begin to do their thing, transforming raw, chewy meat into something juicy and tender. A myriad of changes begin to occur, mostly having to do with proteins and collagen, the end result being beautifully cooked meat.
As with any cooking method, in spite of being dubbed “idiot proof” there is always the danger of overcooking. In the case of sous vide the food may appear perfectly cooked but spending too long in the water bath results in meat that is strangely dry and flavorless.
The key is figuring out the minimum time needed to achieve your preferred results. It’s also important to acknowledge that while we can chart specific time and temperature ratios for different ingredients, you still need to test for doneness. Even if that test is simply feeling the meat, fish or vegetables through the bag to be sure that it is tender and cooked to your liking. Some days it takes a little longer than others. This is determined by the weight of your pieces and their individual composition. Never blindly assume that something has cooked long enough or that a smaller piece needs to cook as long as your standard portion. It behooves you to check each and every time you cook something to be sure.
We love what sous can do for vegetables, achieving a supple and tender texture that is almost impossible with any other cooking method. By adding flavored liquid to the bag, we season the vegetables as they cook so that when they come out of the circulator they are ready for anything. Cooking vegetables in their own or other juices produces something intensely flavorful and produces a liquid base that is can be used as the foundation of a vinaigrette, soup or sauce to accompany either the vegetable itself or anything else sharing the plate.
Classic braising techniques can be translated to sous vide and by adjusting your cooking time you can play with new textures. What sous vide also gives you is the freedom to grill, sear, fry or sauté the finished ingredients and add a beautifully caramelized outer layer to the preparation. As with any new twist or technique, we truly believe that if you can’t improve on the original there’s no point in changing it. Sous vide is a tool to help you create food that is more intensely your own. In the end it’s all about creating something delicious and flavorful that you would be more than happy to sit down and enjoy yourself.
The inspiration for our dishes and techniques stemmed from our ability to use the wide range of Poly Science equipment and the availability of a variety of different cuts of Cervena venison. With the tools and the ingredients as our inspirations we then rounded out our plates with several other key ingredients: coconut, butternut squash and squid.
In our first preparation, the venison salad we added a few additional elements to add flavor and depth to the dish. The first major tweak was creating a faux barrel-aged rare au jus. We used The Sonicprep ultrasonic homogenizer to infuse the juices we collected from cooking the venison flank steak with the flavor of charred, whiskey barrel wood chips. We seasoned the jus with Red Boat fish sauce and added a bit of body with the addition of 0.1% xanthan gum. This deep red jus was the thread that wove all of the elements together. The second key note in this dish was created by using the Smoking Gun to cold smoke the squid rings. One cycle of whiskey barrel smoke gave them a rich aroma and made each bite seem meatier and more complex in flavor.
In the second dish we wanted to highlight the texture and juiciness of the venison shanks. We cook them at 57°C for 24 hours. Using our method, the collagen in the shank does not have enough time to denature and become gelatin. What does happen is that the meat becomes fully cooked and remains juicy. The key is to remove all the silver skin and connective tissue from the shanks. The trimmings were not discarded. Instead we added them to the cooking liquid from the shanks and simmered them together to extract the flavor and gelatin and allow them to be absorbed into the sauce. Then we strained it and used it to glaze the meaty nuggets of shank meat. We paired the venison shank with the lemon scented squid tentacles and the butternut butter cream, which was made with the assistance of The Sonicprep.
Venison Shank, Lemon Scented Squid Tentacles and Butternut Butter Cream
Our third dish was a pasta course. We made the noodles at the Arcobaleno booth at the Star Chefs Congress using one of their pasta extruders. The sauce was a variation of classic Bolognese made with ground venison hearts. As we were tasting it we realized that it needed a bit more sweetness and creaminess. We had several cans of coconut milk on hand for our other preparations and it seemed only natural to reach for it. The addition of one can of coconut milk to our sauce transformed it into something exceptional.
Salt Curing Venison Heart
The fourth course featured slow cooked venison heart. Originally we felt that we would need to cook the heart for 24+ hours. As it was cooking we checked on it regularly. At the 8-hour mark we felt the heart beginning to soften. At nine hours the heart reached the texture we were looking for, firm with some resistance but clearly tender within. The batch of hearts we prepped for the Congress needed to cook for 10 hours to achieve this same texture. Attention to detail and culinary awareness always pay off. Cooking is an inexact alchemy for all of its science and ratios. In the end a chef has to trust his or her senses above all else. To finish, the venison heart was then re-thermed in a water bath, laid out on racks and basted with aromatic butter. We then used the incredible candied pecans from chef Philip Speer, half of the dynamic duo that heads Uchi and Uchiko in Austin, to improve our pecan crust. His pecans are cooked in a brown sugar syrup until they become “goopy,” about 90 minutes. Then they are drained, deep fried, and seasoned with salt and sugar.
He made them for his workshop and they were so amazing that now they are a staple in our pantry. We served the venison heart with our coconut lentils and a diced roasted butternut squash gel.
Vanison Rack Absorbing Finishing Touch of Pine and Cedar Aromas
The final course that we served for the workshop was venison rack. We brined it in coconut milk and then cooked it sous vide. After it was cooked we were able to re-therm it and then remove it from the bags and pat them dry. Then we dipped them into liquid nitrogen for thirty seconds to freeze the exterior and followed immediately with a dunk into a 375°F fryer to evenly brown it. The racks were then placed on a rack covered with cedar and pine branches to rest and allow the aroma of the evergreen to gently permeate the meat. The “roasted” rack of venison was served sliced and topped with torn cabbage leaves which were cooked sous vide at 85°C for 1 hour in a butternut squash “cream.”
It was a little chaotic, in a good way we think, getting everything served, trying to explain our approach to sous vide cooking and giving participants time to taste and absorb the food. What we tried to show through the execution of multiple dishes in a confined environment is that technology may help improve efficiency, creativity and functionality but you still need to rely on your knowledge, experience and the use of all of your senses in order to weave everything together into something delicious and special that clearly represents your personal sensibilities.
